I’ve decided to take my notes from a class I taught on Understanding Scripture last year and upload them as posts to this Blog. Originally, this material was taught in five sections. Here, it has been split into more manageable chucks. Several posts came before this one. You may want to check them out before you start this one.
When I originally taught this series, I took one week and dedicated it to walking chronologically through the Bible in about one hour. I split it into much smaller chunks here. If you want to read the whole thing, it's available PDF format. I’ll be posting these a little more often than once a week since each one is so short.
Reason For This
When I first started to set all of the Biblical narratives in their historical context and understand what happened when, it made the Bible make more sense to me. Going to Bible college has made that even clearer to me now by giving me even more information about historical context.
My friends at school and I were talking and they were discussing how much knowing when something happened in relation to other events helps them make sense out of the Bible. These are probably all stories that you’ve heard before; however, I’m hoping that hearing them in order will help you out. If you decide to, you can use these notes and the timeline you’ve been given to determine just what had happened before, after, and during whatever book you decide to study next.
How to Use this
Once you have a basic idea of the flow of redemptive history, you should find that you have an easier time making sense out of what people might have been thinking. The notes have chapter and verse references for many of the major events in Biblical history, as well as some dates. You can use these as a reference as you try to place whatever book you are studying within redemptive history.
Make sure you allow the scale of redemptive history to affect you. In the Bible God is telling a really big story. Keeping in mind everything that is going on should help you interpret the Bible; you will begin to see what you’re studying as a smaller part of a much bigger picture. This will make individual events seem both more and less important. They will seem less important because they’re just a small part of a really big story, but they will seem more important because they take place within the greatest story ever told.
Creation
Let’s dig right in and go to the first book in the Bible, Genesis. Moses starts off by telling us that God created everything in six days; six times, upon completing a work, God declared what He had made to be good (Genesis 1:4,10,12,18,21,25). On the sixth day, we are told that God made man in His own image (Genesis 1:27). God, the King, blesses them and commands them to bless and rule over His creation (Genesis 1:28). God’s plan was to have an entire planet of people made in His image: enjoying and then praising God for His creation and for Him. After making man in His own image, God looked at everything He had made and declared it to be very good (Genesis 1:31).
For clarity, we should try to define goodness. We know that God is good, and God said that man was created good. For our purposes we’ll do what many theologians like to do and divide goodness up into two categories; this will make things easier to deal with later. The first category is called “natural good.” Natural good is a quality that is good to have, but is morally neutral. Happiness, strength, knowledge, power, and wisdom are all examples of natural good; they are good to have, but it’s not evil to lack them. Man was created naturally good. The second category is moral good; examples of moral good would include love, honesty, mercy, faithfulness, and justice. Man was created naturally and morally good; he was wise and he would use that wisdom to love God and his neighbor. This is why we are told that man and woman were naked and not ashamed (Genesis 2:25); they had nothing to hide, they had no sin.
The only rule God gave man was that they not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 2:16–17). This was not intended as a kill-joy. God was not holding any good thing back; He was a loving Father protecting His children. He warned that they would die in the day they ate of it. He was being kind to them even in that rule.
You seem to be importing the meaning or the categorization of goodness into the text. I wonder if this could lead down the wrong road of interpreting the passage. At the end of every day of creation. God says it was good. Then after creating man, God says it is exceedingly good. I don't see how from the flow of the passage, the categorization of morally good and naturally good, fit in.
You’re right. Categorization isn’t in the Text. It’s a tool I am using to explain what will happen at the fall. In the fall, we’ll see man fall to a depraved state. Creation is still good in some sense, but man lacks any real sense of moral goodness. He is still, however, said to be in the imago Dei in Genesis 9. I think having categories can help explain how creation can still be good while man is utterly depraved.
I never want to imply that the categories are authoritative. I wrote this a while ago and was reacting to a tendency I noticed in the church to believe that man was still (morally) good because he was created in the imago Dei. I wanted to clarify that it is possible for man still to be “good” in some sense, still created in the imago Dei, but still be wicked and deserving of hell.
Hopefully this will make more sense when we talk about the fall, but thank you for pointing out that my point on goodness was not exegetical.